Peter Geye - Wintering

After supper Harry labored at tanning the bearskin. With the bear’s thighbone he rubbed the skin soft, a practice that Freddy Riverfish had taught him and that had been passed down for a thousand years among his kin. Gus marveled at his father’s fluency in skinning and butchering and fleshing and tanning and cooking. It was as if he’d done nothing in his entire life but put a bear carcass to good use. And the work obviously pleased him.

Gus reckoned that the debacle involving the bear had helped his father to regain himself and took comfort in seeing him look and act like the man he had always known. But that same experience cast Gus even deeper into a wilderness of confusion. He responded by abandoning himself to cutting and splitting and stacking the oak. Eight or ten hours a day, for days on end. His hands cramped and callused and grew viselike in their strength. His shoulders and back, which had always been lithe and lean, turned unequivocally muscular after the countless hours spent sawing and swinging a maul.

They were fateful days. The sky was heavy and hard as an anvil at times, then light enough to whisper the whitest snow down on them. It snowed every day, though only twice with purpose. One day it started at dawn and didn’t relent until suppertime. When Gus went outside for a night’s worth of wood, snow came up over his boot tops. A couple nights later it snowed while they slept, and by morning the lake was solid white. Just like that the bay had frozen and the landscape doubled in whiteness.

When it wasn’t snowing, the north wind blew the fallen flakes up in waves, and before long the bay was clear, the ice mirroring the dull sky, and it seemed impossible the world could be so colorless. It took night and the coming of stars to shed any brightness on their lives, and the few nights the clouds parted they stood together on the shore as though it were a Mexican beach and they were tanning their cold faces, staring silently up into the sky, waiting, each of them, for something they could not know.

—

When he laid the last split log on the woodpile, it seemed nearly as large as the shack. Gus stood back and studied their camp. The shack and the cache and the woodpile. The privy a ten-step walk toward the woods. Their canoes leaning keels-up against a tree on the edge of the clearing. The smoke rising from the chimney and the icicles hanging from the eaves trough. It was the most inexplicable fort in the long and cold history of world. But one he was so glad and grateful of he could not, even now, all these years later, find words to express his relief at its being there.

That night — after the last of the wood was split — they stood together again on the shoreline. The wind still blew from the north. And the ice beneath their feet sent a sudden shiver into the soles of their boots. Then a proper moan issued from the frozen lake. Gus thought it sounded animal and he turned quickly to the woods behind them.

“That’s the ice,” Harry said. “Must be a spring feeding this bay.” He stepped back, and Gus swore he felt the air pulse as his father shook with cold.

The ice moaned again. Now it was musical, like a low note from a clarinet.

“Beautiful, eh?” Harry said. “You’ve not heard that before?”

“No.”

“It’s just our bay settling in.”

It was such a strange and lovely sound, Gus remembered. After days of hearing nothing but the thwack of splitting wood and the clunk of piling it up, to hear something like music again came as both a relief and a great sadness. Especially because it was native and wild but also because it seemed, inexplicably, destined for just the two of them. As though they deserved that euphonious moment. To prove that life was not just gathering wood and butchering bear. Gus closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them the clouds in the night sky whistled away and in their wake the stars snapped like embers in a fire. The ice sang on. They listened until it quieted and then turned back for their shack.

—

Harry seldom spoke of his own father, Odd Eide. Neither to me nor to Gus. Or he seldom spoke of him when he wasn’t extolling his command of one of the family trades. Almost everything Gus knew about his grandfather he’d learned from hearsay. From gossip and legend.

So he was surprised when Harry brought him up that night. He’d draped the bearskin over his shoulders and took a cup of coffee to his bunk. “My old man, he never hunted bear. Everything else, but not bear.”

Every time Gus looked at the bearskin he bristled and glanced away. “Is it true about him?” Gus said.

“What?”

“That a bear took his eye?”

“Yup.”

“That he crawled into a bear den?”

Harry smiled. “It’s true. Right on the Burnt Wood. We passed the place coming out here.” He took a sip of coffee and smiled. “I guess you and him got something else in common.” This was meant to be playful, even sympathetic, but it stung and Gus felt foolish again. “Of course, you got out of your spat with both eyes.”

“Some consolation.”

“Well, it’s better than the alternative.”

Harry set the cup on the floor and shifted the bearskin on his shoulders. “I always admired him for doing it. Pretty goddamn tough, if you ask me. He was only about twelve years old.”

Over the course of their time on the borderlands Gus would come to learn the whole story. Not only of his grandfather and the bear but of his grandmother and great-grandmother, of the watch salesman and Hosea Grimm. But as of that night of the ice song, he knew only rumors. “It’s weird,” he said, “how you never talk about your dad. About our family history.”

“History,” Harry said, as though it were a profanity. “History for us doesn’t exist. History requires proof, of which we have almost none.” He looked at his son and then quickly added, “You have plenty of proof. Nothing’s ever happened to you that might compromise your history.”

“Like getting lost up here?” Gus said. “Or killing the bear? Nothing like that counts?”

“Those are stories, bud, not history. Not yet, leastways. Besides, I talk about my old man all the time.”

“Sure, whenever we’re cooped up in the fish house working on a boat, you remind me how skilled he was. At fishing, too. But you never talk about anything else. You never told me about when he went into the bear den.”

“I’ve been saving that one,” Harry said, a wry smile on his face. “Anyway, I thought you were done listening to my stories.”

Gus felt himself blush.

“All right. You want to hear about him?”

“It’s just that I’ve never even seen a picture of him. I wouldn’t know him if he walked through the door.”

“Well, that ain’t happening. But I could tell you about him some.” Again he shifted the bearskin, then sat up straight and wiped the hair back from his eyes. “My old man never knew who his father was. Never met him. He also never knew his mother. She died soon after he was born. The story goes, she came from Norway expecting to find the promised land. I guess that didn’t work out. But the land on which our house is built? It came down to my father when his mother’s people died. You ever hear of Rune Evensen? Our house is on his land. Or what used to be.”

“Why didn’t Rune Evensen take care of Thea Eide?”

“His own wife strung herself up from the barn roof just to get away from him. He was unglued real good, that one.”

“So your dad raised himself?”

“More or less. Learned everything he knew — which was plenty — by trying until he didn’t fail. He didn’t fail much.”

“I guess he passed that along to you.”

“Naw, all I got were his good looks.”

“Not much of an inheritance,” Gus said, and they both smiled. After a moment, he said, “Who would do that? Climb into a bear den?”